World's Largest Candy Cane to Be Erected in Duluth

Santa hands candy canes out to children, families hang the red-and-white candies on their Christmas trees, and GiftBasketsPlus.com uses them while filling their holiday gift baskets. As soon as the busy Christmas season slows down, the Duluth-based company plans to erect a giant 63-foot-tall candy cane – the world’s largest – at its headquarters at 3780 Old Norcross Road.

GiftBasketsPlus.com owner Rome Dhanani invited the community to attend the candy cane raising ceremony tentatively scheduled between Christmas and New Year’s Day. The Guinness World record for the largest candy cane is 58 feet, Dhanani said. “We want to beat the record by at least five feet.”

“Our people are calculating the amount of ingredients [for the record-setting candy cane] and how to set it up and support it,” he said. “Everything has to be perfect. There’s no room for error.”

Dhanani promised to let Duluth Patch know when the giant candy cane will be erected.

Christmas is GiftBasketPlus.com’s busiest season for sales. “It’s so busy right now,” Dhanani said. Although the company offers gift baskets for all occasions throughout the year, it does about 60 percent of its business this time of year, he said.

“We could have spent money on some marketing scheme,” Dhanani said, “but we decided to get the community together, do something big and have some fun.”

Dhanani, a Lawrenceville resident, acquired GiftBasketsPlus.com, which was founded in 1998, in mid-2010. The company packs and ships its specialty gift baskets from warehouses across the country, he said.

GiftBasketPlus.com’s plans to put up the huge candy cane has attracted attention. The company initially posted a notice on its blog and issued a press release via a wire service Dec. 9. The story got picked up by Google and ended up on more than 1,000 sites, Dhanani said. There were so many hits that the company’s website crashed for 20 minutes the next day (Dec. 10), he said. Lots of people have been tweeting about it on Twitter, Dhanani added.